ABD will help converge content from various screens - PC, games consoles, mobile phones onto your TV.
Imagine a solution where there is one set-top box in your home and it helps you to converge content from various screens – be it PC, games consoles, mobile phones - on to your television. This is the next-generation home we are talking about and Switzerland–based $360 million Advanced Digital Broadcast is set to bring this technology into India.
This concept requires hybrid set-top boxes that interact with the television network, the broadband Internet and all local devices including PCs, games consoles and mobile phones, enabling people to access all the content they want on the TV.
Speaking exclusively to Business Standard Veronique Malan, VP, Strategic Marketing, ADB Global said: “ We expect content, not device, convergence to be a major theme in the coming years, particularly addressing how operators handle the inevitable interaction between TV, other consumer electronics devices and the Internet. Trends in multimedia consumption and consumer tastes mean it is now time to start preparing for a new consumer TV experience in every home.”
ADB is focused on design, development and supply of products to the world-wide digital television market and is embarking on a massive expansion in India even as the market in India is set for an explosive growth. The rush to offer Direct-To-Home (DTH) services from many players in India including Anil Dirubhai Ambani Group, Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Dish TV, Sun Group and the increasing adoption of these services by scores of customers in India is set to have made ADB increase its focus on India.
In the high-end segment of content convergence, the actual performance of a set-top-box depends heavily on how well its software is tuned to an operator’s specific infrastructure. The high-end segment is evolving towards hybrid devices, able to provide traditional broadcast TV offer (e.g. cable programming), alongside Internet on TV and content sharing with other devices in the home.
Ms Malan added that for operators it will be critical to be able deliver an enhanced consumer TV experience yet minimize the deployment cost of these new applications, for example by innovating in software optimization, to ensure that these applications can run on current generation hardware/chip and do not require extra hardware investment.
She said ADB is working closely to DTH service providers in India to offer next-generation enhanced consumer TV experience to the India market. “Consumer appetite for content is growing. Broadcast TV is not the only media entertainment choice in the home anymore, and it needs to compete with other sources of digital entertainment, whether provided by the PC, smartphone, gaming consoles, media players. Personal content (home photos, videos, music) and social networking content are likely to become more appealing for TV viewers and our solution enables this convergence,” she noted.
According to Ms Malan, ADB plays in the high-end segment of the market, selling advanced devices to pay TV operators across all platforms - Cable, Satellite, Terrestrial, and IP. “For 2010, in India, industry analysts expect the market for digital pay-TV set-top boxes to range from 7 to 10 million units. They expect the high-end segment -which they reckon currently represents 10 to 15 per cent of the total - to be the growth engine for this market in the coming years,” Ms Malan noted.
Detailing how the market will in India will evolve, she said: “The digitalization of TV has only just started, but it will take time to develop. We will scale our investment as the opportunities emerge. We believe that the trends/dynamics that we have witnessed in other emerging markets will also materialize in India in the long run - namely the move to higher-end, advanced, feature-rich solutions. We are investing now to gain a strong foothold in advance of these trends.”
Detailing India plans she said that they have a strong research & development team in Poland and ADB will surely look at how to tap the huge talent pool in India. The set top boxes to start with will be initially imported from South East Asian countries and going forward ADB may also look at contract manufacturing in India.
